Europe’s Mainstream Right and the Climate Change Agenda

This paper presents a draft introductory chapter of a forthcoming book project focusing on mainstream right-wing parties and their approach to climate change. The book will examine a series of case studies of centre-right parties across Europe (the UK, Germany, Spain, Austria and Sweden), taking a long-run view to trace how such parties approached climate change policy when it first emerged as a mainstream political issue in the 1980s and 1990s, and how their approaches have developed and changed over time. The book takes inspiration from previous work which has explored the ideological underpinnings of populist radical right parties’ approaches to climate change policy (Lockwood, 2018) to explore this topic in relation to mainstream right-wing parties. The book seeks to make two principal contributions: (i) to understand how the issue of climate change has fitted into the pre-existing ideological approaches of mainstream centre-right parties in Europe (and whether this has been similar between different centre-right parties/countries); (ii) to explore what such parties’ approaches to climate change demonstrates for understanding how and when parties change their policy positions. This paper will present a draft chapter which sets out: the research question, principal contributions, theoretical framework and methodology for the overall book.